Newsletter: 2022 in review

I hope the last days of 2022, despite being yet another turbulent and difficult year, are finding everyone safe and well. I don’t do newsletters every year, but sometimes it feels worth looking back a little to take stock.

There are always opportunities missed, but overall, I’m pretty pleased with how things have gone.

I had the great pleasure and privilege of writing about the genius of Charles M Schulz and Peanuts to mark the centenary of Schulz’s birth for The Spectator. Like most of us, I encountered his work first as a child, but going back to it in later life, I’ve been astonished at the creative and emotional breadth and depth of his invention.

I’ve had two essays published in the lovely literary magazine Slightly Foxed.

The first explored the deep-buried autobiographical hurts of John Masefield and The Midnight Folk – and tried to explain something of its deep and compelling magic. It’s perhaps my favourite children’s book and, I think, far better than its better-known sequel The Box of Delights.

The second piece for Slightly Foxed was on Damon Runyon‘s Broadway stories – mostly about his style and the world he evokes, but also a little about childhood memories of my late, and much-missed, father and his influence on my reading.

Listing these essays now, I see they’re all childhood-adjacent. Can a think-piece on the Bagpuss universe be far behind, I ask myself?

I also wrote a feature at the beginning of the year for All About History magazine on the origins of the El Dorado myth – something I only knew a little about beforehand, so it was fascinating to be able to delve further.

I’ve continued to write the Months Past column for History Today, which is a constant source of delight – for me, at least! All 24 can be found on the History Today website here, together with the others I’ve written over the last couple of years. I think my favourites to research and write this year were on the riotous premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring; on the extraordinary Victoria Claflin Woodhull, the first woman to run for the US presidency; and on John Payne Collier, Victorian scholar and Shakespearean forger and fraud.

It didn’t make it into January issue of the magazine, but I also had great fun writing a piece on the Mayerling Incident, which led me to the happy discovery of the glorious memoirs of Walburga, Lady Paget, which I’m writing about for Slightly Foxed in the new year.

I’m thrilled to have started reviewing for both The Economist and The Times this year.

For The Economist, I reviewed Jessie Childs’ The Siege of Loyalty House, about the siege of Basing House during the English Civil War. I am a great admirer of Jessie’s work – I reviewed her previous book, God’s Traitors here – and her new book is a powerful and moving exploration of lives caught up in the terror and pity of civil war. (Perhaps also my book of the year!)

Also for The Economist, I reviewed Edward Wilson Lee’s A History of Water, which is both a double biography of Portuguese imperial archivist Damião de Góis and Luís de Camões, author of the Portuguese national epic poem The Luciads, and a deep dive into European reactions to the worlds it encountered beyond its borders during the age of exploration. All this wrapped tight inside a murder mystery. Dazzling.

For The Times I reviewed Joyce Tyldesley’s Tutankhamun: Pharaoh. Icon. Enigma, an enjoyable and provocative re-evaluation of Tutankhamen life and afterlife which uses multiple perspectives to emphasise the story of the boy-king himself – rather than the discovery of his tomb.

Also for The Times I reviewed A Murderous Midsummer, Mark Stoyle’s vividly realised and superbly gripping history of the 1549 Prayer Book Rebellion in the West Country – which, like most such uprisings, resulted in tragedy. Stoyle’s intimate knowledge of both the sources and the landscape of the rebellion makes his account all the more poignant.

For New Humanist I reviewed David George Haskell’s exquisitely written Sounds Wild & Broken, at once a thrillingly beautiful and profound exploration of the sonic riches of the natural world and a warning about its ongoing and imminent destruction.

Later in the year I reviewed two other books for New Humanist, both in their own ways powerful and moving meditations on ideas of exile, identity and belonging. William Atkins’ Exiles: Three Island Journeys follows the lives of three 19th-century political figures exiled to the furthest reaches of their respective empires. Amaryllis Gacioppo’s debut Motherlands: In Search of our Inherited Cities is a more personal memoir tracing her matrilineal family’s history of generational displacement and migration.

I’ve reviewed three books for Literary Review this year: two Tudor histories and a memoir.

Joanne Paul’s The House of Dudley is a wonderful shadow history of the Tudor century told through the lives of three generations of the Dudley family, who came tantalisingly close to the crown themselves – despite several of them ending their lives on the executioner’s block.

Lucy Wooding’s Tudor England meanwhile is the best single-volume history of the period I’ve read. It weaves together insightful and perceptive chapters on each monarch in turn with richly detailed and evocative essays on life, livelihoods, landscape, language and belief across the century.

I also reviewed the anthropologist Hugh Brody’s Landscapes of Silence, an intense, painful, fragmentary memoir tracing an arc from childhood terrors to the disrupted idylls of once-nomadic peoples in the high Arctic. Some phrases and passages from it have haunted me for months.

For The Quietus I wrote about Vashti Bunyan’s Wayward: Just Another Life to Live, her moving memoir of resilience and redemption in and after the 1960s. It stands on its own terms as a fascinating slice of social and cultural history, but if you like Bunyan’s music it’s a must-read.

Also for The Quietus I reviewed Markiyan Kamysh’s Stalking the Atomic City, a compelling and timely account of his forays into the forbidden zone around the nuclear plant at Chernobyl – of the abandoned places he found, and the psychic abandonment that comes with such trespasses.

I haven’t finished writing it yet, but I’m also reviewing James Yorkston new novel, The Book of Gaels for The Quietus.

I reviewed Linda Kinstler’s Come to This Court and Cry for The Critic. Kinstler uses her own familial connections to the ‘Holocaust by bullets’ in Latvia to ask profound questions about the nature of justice and the value of bearing witness. I would have liked Kinstler to explore her family history more; but it is nevertheless a powerful and important book.

It hasn’t been published yet, but I have another review pending for The Critic – of Heaven on Earth, Emma Wells’ account of the lives of sixteen of Europe’s greatest cathedrals, which I wrote back in the summer.

For The Author, the quarterly magazine of the Society of Authors, I reviewed Emma Smith’s Portable Magic, an exploration of the meanings and significance with which we invest books as physical artefacts. I was greatly looking forward to this, and I enjoyed reading it, but I thought it a missed opportunity overall.

I reviewed Hoax, Victor Stater’s new history of the Popish Plot, for The Tablet. It’s a well-paced and in places deeply moving account of the affair, with a keen sense of the political uses of moral hysteria – as well as of the sheer malignity of Titus Oates, the chief contriver of the conspiracy. (I’m not sure it’s an advance on JP Kenyon’s book on the topic, though.)

For History Today, I wrote about James Clark’s new history of The Dissolution of the Monasteries. Clark has done extraordinary work in the archives and every page of this dense and rewarding book is packed with new information and detail.

Lastly, I reviewed Philip Parker’s Small Island, a compact history of Britain for the post-Brexit world, for the Times Literary Supplement. It always feels a huge privilege to write for the TLS – my 18-year-old self wouldn’t have dreamed it was possible – so I wish I’d like this book more. I tried hard to find good things to say about it, but struggled to see past its flaws.

As for poetry, I’ve rethought my writing process over the last year or two and that’s been very fruitful and rewarding. The corollary of that is that I haven’t done a great deal of submitting. I’ve had poems published by Under the Radar, Green Ink Poetry, and Black Nore Review. They are all now gathered online here. (Yes, I’m painfully aware I need a decent poetry website!) I’m delighted to say I’ve also had poems accepted for publication in the new year by Bad Lilies and another magazine I’m not allowed to name just yet.

Relatedly, I’m also currently writing a piece for The Author about the challenges and rewards of running small-press poetry magazines in the UK.

In other news, I’m very grateful to Suzannah Lipscomb for inviting me back on to her brilliant Not Just the Tudors podcast. Having talked about the Dissolution of the Monasteries last year, this year we talked about El Dorado and Walter Ralegh.

I also appeared on the The Spectator’s weekly podcast discussing my essay on Charles M Schulz. (And I was grateful too to Tom Holland for kindly giving a shout out to my Tolkien book on The Rest is History.)

I have various thoughts and plans for next year – including more writing for myself, I hope – but in the meantime, I hope everyone has a lovely Christmas and a happy, safe and prosperous 2023.